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Online-autobiography theory

Jorn Barger January 2000

As I find my own online autobiography [qv] growing in unexpected ways, I'm starting this page with resources and links on this topic.

What's most interesting to me at the moment is the idea of having separate pages for each topic in your life-- music, books, movies, career, etc. (Here's one that's way better than mine: Evany Thomas.)

And I'm also interested in how to enrich the text with hyperlinks.

NEW: mailing list on these topics


How-to

Writing style:

Think about movie storylines. Often, a director will choose to tell the story in flashbacks, or to intersplice flashbacks with current action. Others may use different voices: the narrator telling the story as a child, as a teenager, as an adult.

Timeline approach:

Keep the time line nearby for a couple of days and keep filling it out. Ask yourself some questions: How can I summarize my life? What are the themes? The most important things that happened? The biggest events? What are the critical moments and clues to who I am?

Memory joggers: [more]

How I liked to play
Board games and card games we played
Radio shows we listened to

As therapeutic self-analysis:

One of the more helpful brief procedures for letting a small group get to know you is a "life graph"--a line drawn year by year showing the highs and lows of your life

Sociopolitical dimensions:

Would it be enough to include blank pages for other special moments like the first gay crush, the first time you did drugs, an encounter with the police, the first time you had sex, the first experience of discrimination, the inability to get a job, the divorce, remembering the death of Malcolm X or Tupac or Cesar Chavez or Lady Diana or Mother Teresa, and so on?



Tools

Links for children; links; links

MyStory writing-aid app for Win95 (non-Web only)

Guidebooks: [ad]; [sample], [another], [ghostwriter], ditto, syllabus, ditto, therapeutic, tips, critique

Quotations

Offline-texts bibliography, booklength, for children


Theory (mostly way poncy)

"As long as memory remains unwritten it is safe." [cite]

Analysis of James Joyce's approach

John P Palmer: homepages as autobio; hypertexting existing autobios

U of Vt class: Samuel R Delany, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Cindy Sherman, Rene Magritte. [Amy Freed]

U of Texas class: Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston

Myron Turner's Sea-Changes meta-biography [about]

James Olney

masculinity, and comics

Victorian


Topical

Music: Jorn Barger (w/links), ???

Links: to Amazon's RealAudio samples of your faves at different periods

Internet: Jorn Barger (w/links)

Links: to old archives of your Net postings

Drugs: Erik Davis

Nature: R. Hays Cummins (w/links, illustrated); Jim Macdonald

Cars: Joe Aldern

Computer graphics: Gavin Miller

Writing: Beth Sehill

Education: Liza w/pix

Links: the homepage of your school, mentions of teachers and classmates

High school: Jorn Barger

Transgendered: Kelsy

Medical: Barry D. Sheets

Religious: Charles Darwin, Randy Willis, Kathleen Long, Andrew Palfreyman

Movies: anon

Links: Internet Movie Database entries

Theater: Lady Gregory

Baseball: David Perkins

Career: Terri Welles (playmate), Jim Fitzpatrick (archeologist), Alan Weiss (marine)

Children's: Anthony Ortelli (10yo), Sarah Longval (12yo), Marcel Proust (13yo), Alex Vaynshteyn (15yo); [poens]

Cults: Philip Brown

Attitude: anon


Online

Most detailed: Archimedes Plutonium, Bud Finlayson, Walt Karwicki, Stephen H

Frames: Glenn McMurry, Arn Anderson, Kornel Romaniuk

Multipage topical: Evany Thomas, Holly Lisle (fantasy author), Kardas, Adina S

Multipage illustrated: Bicycle Boy, Myron Turner, JK Rowling

Multipage hand-drawn: Betsy Byars, Luc Leplae, Carol Lay

Multipage: Steve Edwards, Donald L Mark

Onepage w/links: Erik Davis, Michael J. Miller, Dono Harjanto, Charles E. Galvin, Jr, Ron Gambill, Viktoriya Sokolova, Al Lutins, Eric P Hibbison

Onepage illustrated: Piper Louise Gump

No links, one page: Zulfikar Ramzan, Jeffrey Scott, Ian Coffey, Daniel Diaz, Long Vang, Maria Dorothea O'Ryan

Imaginative: porcupine

Search-patterns: "I was born...", "my autobiography"


Etexts:

Ted Nelson (hypertext pioneer)

Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Italo Calvino, Mother Jones, August Derleth, Nikola Tesla

Edna Lyall

Religious: Paramhansa Yogananda, George Fox, St Patrick, Isaac Lane, Amanda Smith

James Nasmyth

Henry Bessemer

Henry Watterson

Social scientists: Margaret Sanger, BF Skinner, Milton Friedman, George J Stigler, Franco Modigliani

Scientists: S Chandrasekhar, TH Huxley

US black leaders: Booker T Washington, James W Johnson, Fredrick Douglass

Ray Charles

Catherine Helen Spence

Sigrid Undset

Harry Smith

John Parker

Thomas R Cech

Rose Leis

Walter J Burghardt

US politics: Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson [onepage]

Geronimo

Calamity Jane

Weni (GIFs of heiroglyphics)

Old South


Suggestions

You can submit a new URL or any other suggestion for this page by typing it into the box below. It will instantly become visible to anyone at this comments page. I should get around to checking it out and updating it above within a week or three, at which point I'll delete it from the comments page.

If you want credit, include your name and email (otherwise it's anonymous). You can use HTML but you don't have to.


Web-design pages:
main : academia : info-design : adding value : resource-pages : lessons-learned : best-worst : plugging leaks

Special topics:
surfing-skills : url-hacking : open content : semantics : pagelength : linktext : startpages : bookmarklets : weblogging : colors : autobiographical pages : thumbnail-graphics : web-video : timeline of hypertext

Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth : page-parsing : firstcut-parser : html-history : semantic web

Design prototypes:
topical portal : dense-content faq : annotated lit : random-access lit-summary : poetry sampler : gossipy history : author-resources : hyperlinked-timeline : horizontal-timeslice : web-dossier

Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com : Altavista.com : 1911encyclopedia.com : Google.com : IMDb.com : Perseus.org : Salon.com : Yahoo.com

Older stuff:
design-lab : design-checklist : HyperTerrorist : design-theory : design cog-sci



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